Journal entry from 1999-08-28

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

[I brought this back with me on disk.  I have a notebook in which I
recorded some subsequent happenings.]

I can't hope to actually record everything that's happened in the last
few days, or even the main points.  The best I can do is to mention a
few things I remember.

I went to a convenience store to buy a comb and razors.  A pack of
three double-bladed disposable safety razors cost $2.49.  A comb cost
$1.38, and had no price tag on the shelf.  I asked the gal behind the
counter about that; she said that nobody put price tags on their stuff.
"I'm not from around here," I said.

The hotel we're staying in is called the Budget Suites.  It costs $200
a week (or a bit more by the day) at the government rate.  My room
is permeated with the stench of ancient cigarette smoke and air
"freshener".  There are no mattress pads on the beds.  Everything is
painted and finished very nicely; there are even little adhesive
wood-grain-printed-plastic patches covering the breaks and holes in the
fake-wood doors and fake-wood horizontal surfaces.  Like apparently
everything else human-made in Las Vegas, appearance comes first; the
appearance is quite nice.  The actuality isn't too bad.

Many of our keys (we're staying there in a group with about 20 rooms)
open other people's doors.  One guy walked into somebody else's room
by accident.

Doug and I went to breakfast on Thursday at McDonald's.  I left my
Cleanroom Software Engineering book in the car; he spent the breakfast
reading USA Today.

After we unpacked all the machines, we discovered we hadn't packed a
dongle to enable a certain algorithm in COSMEC (obviously one licensed
from another company.)  Doug had asked me if we had a dongle before we
left; I replied we had two, one for ENVI and one for ERDAS.  Now I know
which dongle he was referring to; it wasn't one of those.

Yesterday we rented a machine to replace the fatally-wounded Stout.
It's got a Matrox Millennium G400 AGP video card, which we were told was
some kind of monster video card.  It supports dual monitors.  But it
can't do better than 1024x768 in 24-bit truecolor (interlaced at 88Hz
at that), and COSMEC needs 24-bit truecolor.  It can drive both monitors
simultaneously, as a large virtual screen, with a resolution of 640x480
per monitor.

I expect this will create some difficulty for whatever poor soul ends
up trying to analyze data on this monitor.

When we rented it Friday night, we got no monitors with it, and thus no
VGA-monitor cables.  I spent an hour driving to Nellis and back to get
the cables we'd left there.

We also bought an APC SmartUPS 700 to try to condition the power coming
from the generator in the motor home we rented.  It claims to be able
to do some voltage correction (high, low, distortion), but comes with
no THD ratings or UL or CSA listings.  It also appears to correct most
distortions by switching over to the battery, and it spends about 30-50%
of the time running off the battery when the machine is powered on.
So the battery runs down rather quickly.

What I think we really want is something called a 'line conditioner',
which is a UPS without the batteries, and reduces THD, EMI, RFI,
and surges (just like this thing) and corrects high and low voltage.
But we couldn't find one, so we settled for this damned heavy UPS.

The van we work at out at Nellis -- half an hour away from the motor
home -- is a shielded enclosure.  Evidently the walls are all metal,
both doors are airlock-style double doors (so you don't leak RFI while
people are going in and out), and each door has little copper fingers
all around it to make electrical contact when the door is closed, like
the copper fingers you find in some computer cases.  (I've seen them
mostly in old Suns.)

Inside, it has (among many other things) separate power circuits for
"black" and "red" power.  This has something to do with Tempest, but
I'm not sure what.

One of the more amusing things I've seen at Nellis is a wooden door
(from Lowe's or somewhere) on the front of a canvas tent.  Still more
amusing was a similar wooden door on a razor-wire enclosure.

There are a dozen or so tents pitched in the enclosed asphalt area where
the van is parked.  It reminds me of kids camping out in the backyard.

All the people running around in jungle-camo fatigues remind me of kids
playing army.  That a lot of them are barely into adulthood reinforces
the impression.

I've been listening to radio shows a lot as I drive back and forth
to Nellis.  I've listened to Art Bell for the first time, and also to
another show (Tom Likus?) where people talk, apparently, mostly about sex.
One woman called in to talk about having casual sadomasochistic sex with
guys she met on AOL.  She talked about how she arranged day-care for
her kids during these trysts.  Art Bell seems to talk mostly about Y2K.

I got to play with some of those digital Nokia cellphones.  They're pretty
nice; I wonder how much (NV)RAM they have in them?  I'd like to write
software for them.  At the moment I'm using an iridescent phone with
no visible model number and what appears to be an IR port on top.
Whatever codec it uses seems to have a few hundred ms of latency,
but it isn't enough to disrupt normal phone conversations noticeably.
It's enough to disrupt them when you talk from one cellphone to another,
though, because it's doubled.  (People seem to pause for a bit before
responding to anything you say.)

I've been drinking lots of Powerade to keep from getting parched.  (The
high yesterday, according to our plus-or-minus-four-degrees Radio Shack
thermometer, was 117.something degrees Fahrenheit.  The radio said it was
115, if I remember correctly.  (The thermometer sensor *was* in the sun,
though.)  The low this morning, at 5:54, was 78.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's 83.4 degrees inside at the moment, and quite comfortable; the
99-degree heat outside feels hot.)

I've been reading this book on Cleanroom software engineering.
It's rather poorly written (actual quotes: "Referential transparency is
maintained when a statebox implements correctly the behavior required
by the black box, and similarly when a clear box implements correctly
the behavior required by the state box."  "Because common services are
used in multiple places in a system, they may have a greater impact on
system reliability relative to other single-instance components.") and
full of hype (actual quotes: "Structured programming was an engineering
process that benefited not only developers, but managers as well.
In particular, managers of large software process found that work could
be structured and measured through top-down development in a systematic
way."  "Function abstraction is a complete and systematic method for
recovering program documentation for understanding and maintenance."
(Function abstraction, as they have defined it, is a heuristic method
for translating a limited set of imperative programs into imprecise
natural-language definitions of functional programs.)  "

[Disk file ends here.]